black water
by sea-salt kisses
Summary: When Roxas first asks Axel to leave, it's high noon on a Sunday afternoon. Gift fic for Annie Christ. AkuRoku AU.


Wow. So, where to start?

This fic is very close to me, personally. It's written about my hometown, and there are a lot of references to the way I grew up and the places I used to hang out as a kid and just, god. This story is catharsis for me in a major way. They say to write what you know, and in everything I've written, I've never written about Memphis – so what better way to cross that bridge than to try it out with my two favourite characters?

Secondly and most foremost, this story is dedicated to one of my best friends, **Lee** (Salmon Lee here on Fanfiction, or 5moked5almon over at tumblr), who has influenced my writing more than words can say. And, to quote one of their author's notes in FCATFZV, "we're going to pretend all the events in this story are fictional." I never really do author's notes, so I'm not sure what else to say. But all of this is for Lee, and I hope they love it.

Written in the five days post-Christmas and beta'd by my friend, **Sam** (thin veins on Fanfiction, and belpheqor on tumblr).

**Black Water**

" _Well, I built me a raft and she's ready for floatin'__  
__Ol' Mississippi, she's callin' my name__  
__Catfish are jumpin'__  
__That paddle wheel thumpin'__  
__Black water keeps rollin' on past just the same__  
__Old black water, keep on rollin'__  
__Mississippi moon, won't you keep on shinin' on me _"

―The Doobie Brothers

The first time Roxas asks Axel to leave, it's high noon on a Sunday afternoon. The two boys perch easily on the edge of their shitty little rowboat drifting lazily down the river – Axel carving into a worm pulled from a Mason jar with a spit-shined hook, Roxas sprawled out at the head with one hand tracing letters in the black water and the other hanging useless between his legs.

"You ever think about runnin'?"

The question catches Axel so off guard he nearly drops his lure, the worm scrambling about frenetically, insides pierced through and gutted; not long to live. Axel eyes the worm and admires its fight, mere moments from death and filled with a gator's rage. Deep down in his mind, he wonders whether the worm has full comprehension; whether it remembered conception or being squeezed out of some filthy hole into the world, cold and wet – did worms lay eggs or give birth? Did the inter-workings of the life of a maggot matter to the world regardless?

The redhead is merciful in crushing the creature's head between both fingers, feeling innards and juice expel onto his fingers and at last eyes Roxas, determined in his expression and piercing Axel with those big blue eyes – bigger than the Mississippi and twice as deep. His momma used to say that all the tugboats from Memphis to New Orleans couldn't sail the length of Roxas's eyes in a day. Course, Axel's momma's always been sweet on the little blond with no mother to speak of, a head full of silly dreams too big for this town.

"Runnin'?" Axel is fifteen and Roxas is thirteen, and if Axel knows one thing, it's that the world isn't a safe place for angel-faced blonds with quick, lashing tongues and good hearts. No, Roxas is best to stay here where Axel can pummel the little shits who corner the kid on the way home from school. He eyes Roxas and eyes the worm, lifeless in his palms. He thinks of the worm, and thinks of the gunshots he hears late at night – gang violence, drug wars, pimps protecting their tricks – and for a fleeting moment, he almost feels-

"Like Huck and Jim," Roxas drawls, dreamy and far-off in some fantasy with a shirtless Axel and a raft made of back hair and tree bark. "Y'think? We could just sail away. You could get a job in a factory in Baton Rouge – you ain't gotta have no diploma for that."

"And what about you, pretty boy? Gonna build us a house like y'gonna build that raft a yours?" Axel's tone is teasing, but underneath is a notion of forebode – a notion Roxas feels sifting through the sieve of his plans; that this conversation is fruitless. He can feel the beginnings of an argument in the way Roxas tenses, in the way the boat rocks as the aftershocks of a barge shoot through the grottos and traps of rotting wood and debris.

"Who says I can't work in the factory too? I got two hands and a strong back – I helped your ma fix the porch after Seifer's gang gotta hold of it."

For a moment, Axel is much older, looking down on Roxas as he shakes his head. His hands fiddle with the dead worm, bits of guts and gristle coating his fingers – he needs a cigarette, not that Roxas would dare allow him one. "Roxas... Huck and Jim ain't real, buddy. Life ain't some novel you read in middle school." Roxas opens his mouth to rebut, but Axel shoots back, hand wiping the remains of the forsaken worm on his coveralls, tempted to reach into the river to cleanse his hands before he recognizes where they are – in the midst of the filth, the decaying river. "You ain't got a damn clue what it's like out there, in the real world. Two kids like us, Rox – we'd end up fodder for a cautionary tale."

Axel never speaks of how much the hurt in Roxas's eyes unsettles him – but it's a catalyst. All of a sudden, this isn't a fishing trip. All of a sudden, Axel knows why Roxas brought him here. There's a split second of hesitation before Axel snags up Roxas's rucksack – predictably heavy – and ignores the way Roxas screams at him to stop. The sack is threadbare and he can see the cans shining through – rows and rows of Chef Boyardee and Spaghettios with pop-tops and a few stray Starburst shining upwards from the bottom. There's a toothbrush with no paste and a package of bar soap, two pairs of ratty Hanes with burns on the waistband. Axel looks up at Roxas to see tears in eyes scooped up from deep beneath the filth of this river – eyes scooped from somewhere far, far away. Roxas should've been born to riches and wealth – to an endless sky and ocean and jewels that gleamed from light reflecting off his hair. No here. Not in the slums of a city in ruin.

"Axel, if we just-"

"No, Roxas. I ain't gonna steal, and I know damn well you ain't get this with your own buck." Lips part charily to spout off another request, to beg a little bit more, and Axel slams his hand down onto the side of the boat – until grimy water splashes across Roxas's face like Axel's slapped him with it. "Quit livin' in that fairytale a yours. You make the grade, you get the hell outta here. Don't think 'bout me, nor Ma, don't think about nothin' but yourself, 'cause ain't nobody gonna do you the same courtesy."

They spend the rest of the fishing trip in silence. Roxas doesn't flinch when Axel pops the top off every last can of food and dumps it into the river. The boat rocks from the bodies of catfish that slam against it, fighting for every drop of processed meat and sauce – a feast for bottom feeders. Axel's almost sure he sees a glimmer of something faint in Roxas's gaze when he throws the bar soap and toothbrush out into the black, but all he hears is sloshing water and the stink of fish; all he sees are gaping, bottomless mouths and he's long forgotten about the worm, drying and beginning to flake off his shirt in the afternoon sun.

* * *

The first real time Roxas asks Axel to run away is after Seifer's knocked out four of his teeth and given him a concussion - ruptured blood vessels in one eye and all along the line of his jaw.

The emergency room of St. Francis reeks of piss and pills, the sort of stench commonly found in the trousers of a nursing home patient, only this is Roxas, little eight year old Roxas, with no insurance and no parents and a foster mother too drunk off her ass to pick up the phone.

So Axel rallies up his mother and they drive all the way from Frayser to the only place that accepts no-insurance patients. They're met with a pretty African American nurse who pops her cherry gum and rolls her eyes at Roxas – just another hood rat looking for attention, and Axel wonders if she's seen younger boys than Roxas in worse condition; what kind of conditioning it takes to look at a beautiful, wounded child and scoff them away. Her name is Nancy, and Axel's up in her face demanding treatment before two thugs in scrubs grab his arms and haul him back – the nurse still popping her gum and typing away at her computer.

"Name, last and first?"

"Roxas fucking Williams, can't you chart all this shit after you make sure he's alright?"

The nurse shoots him a look of loathe, and Axel wonders why his mother still hasn't returned from the car. "I don't need your punk mouth. Answer the questions, and we'll get _Roxas fucking Williams_ some help."

Axel bites his tongue and resists the urge to slam her face into her computer, jab his nails into her eyes until she's bleeding tears just like Roxas. The boy is wrapped in a blanket and half slumped against Roxas, and a male nurse makes a comment that they'll have him in the ER as soon as basic information is given.

"Birthdate?"

"April... April 11th, 92." He isn't sure, and the fact rends his stomach. Axel should know this.

"Family or legal guardian?"

There's a split second of hesitation before Axel lies again, easily. "Me. I'm his brother. He's a foster child living with my mom and I."

The nurse eyes his skeptically, long, white fingernails poised over the keys. Her false nails are as cheap as the pale white wallpaper clinging to the room, the smell of antiseptic and lemon cleaner wafting from behind the counter. He could imagine her starring in some medium-level porno – those fingers working in and out of some other cunt. "Then we'll need to get in contact with his case worker to discuss the probable case of abuse in the home-"

Axel doesn't remember much after that – only lunging at the woman as Roxas is caught by a paramedic. In his rage he's forgotten all about the body slumped against him – all he can see is the way the cheap nurse's brown eyes widen, lips pulling back over a gold eye tooth as she starts to scream for security.

Axel nearly makes it to the counter before there's a needle shoved in his bicep – voices screaming at him, the paramedics, the nurse, his mother – and he remembers nothing more.

It's hours and hours of whitewashed dreams later that he wakes up in groggy half conscious, hands strapped down by velcro to a hard, unforgiving chair. Roxas is peering at him through long blond eyelashes, spread out easily on the bed directly across from Axel's chair, blue eye widening in embarrassment as if caught in the act of something improper. There's a moment of quiet conversation the equivalent of which Axel hasn't felt before; almost like telepathy. His brain registers that his mother is sleeping in the chair on the other side of the room and that there's a morbidly obese woman occupying the bed on the other side of the curtain, but – for a moment, he knows that if his hands weren't bound, they'd be holding Roxas's.

Roxas glances down at his fingers as if scalded, one eye covered in gauze and a white patch, dark bruising around his jaw and an IV strapped to his right wrist. The heart monitor beats a steady rhythm interrupted by the occasional murmur – a heart defect Roxas had at birth. It was harmless, the doctor's said. Just a kink in his wiring. The boy shoots Axel a pink-faced smile before he glances down again, hands playing in his lap like he should have some sort of book there or something, so he could anxiously flip pages instead of look so lost and embarrassed. Axel wonders how long the kid's been staring at him across the room, waiting for him to wake up. It's endearing, the way Roxas wraps his fingers together awkwardly, wincing as the IV adjusts around in his vein, and it makes Axel smile, hazily – not everything is quite there yet. "I wondered when you'd wake up," the blond croaks, before frowning and coughing into his free hand; Axel smiles wider.

When Roxas adjusts in bed, Axel too tries to move for the first time – and finds that he can't. His body feels like its composed of the rubber dildos Roxas once found in his foster mother's bathroom – the same ones Axel brought to his own mother to innocently ask what they were. A thousand weighted down dildos and the same sort of feeling like when he swallows a mouthful of river water when they go swimming – a strong urge to brush his teeth or drink something flavourful, to rid the putrid taste of his own bile.

Ignoring the feeling of rubber joints and limbs, Axel shoots Roxas the softest smile he could hope to muster – the boy is only eight years old, after all – and Seifer and his gang did a number on his pretty face. The redhead could only hope it wouldn't scar, but even if these don't, there's no doubt in his mind someone else will be around to give the child more. Life on the streets doesn't forgive angels, nor does it answer to any sort of higher justice. The thought of Roxas in the hospital again makes Axel's stomach churn uncomfortably, and he focuses once again on smiling at the boy in the hospital bed. "Any idea what they gave me?"

"About a gallon of sleep goo," Roxas answers, the croak beginning to fade. There's a green nurse's button a few inches from his fingertips, and if he needed it, he could press it and an underpaid night shift nurse would fetch him 8 fl oz of tap water. Roxas's fingers make no move for the button, and Axel doesn't offer the suggestion. "They gave some shots to me too, but it was for pain." For the first time, there's a genuine smile on Roxas's face – it's so bright and happy that it makes Axel's heart murmur, too. "I hear you acted somethin' awful in the waiting room."

Axel scoffed, trying once again to move a finger – it was like ten sausages were attached to a palm made out of waffles. "Stupid trick was tryin'a keep you from gettin' help. Without me, you mighta died out there."

There's a silence that rings true, and Axel all at once wishes he could take it back – because if Axel hadn't been the one to find him, Roxas might still be lying in the middle of Raleigh Road, with his back propped against an abandoned convenient store to bleed to death – the cops wouldn't even have blinked. It might have made the news – Sora's death didn't. Kid was found with his throat slit, shoved under a table in a meth lab bust. The scientist from the lab denied any and all involvement in Sora's murder, though his semen and hairs were found in and around Sora's corpse – he was sentenced to life without parole. Five people attended Sora's funeral – Roxas, Axel, Naminé, Xion, and Sora's grandfather ripe with Alzheimer's, who kept asking when the food would be served and whether or not Sora had done his homework on time.

Axel swallows hard around a lump in his throat and wills his body to move. This time, his arms jolt and a cramp begins to build in his calf. He hisses at the pain, as Roxas softly shakes his head from across the room.

"Don't move just yet. We'll both be able to run once we get out of here."

The question stops Axel from moving, the cramp still blazing in his leg as he glances upward – run? "Whatcha wanna run for, Rox?"

Blue eyes close around the weight of a thousand punches, the sort of abuse you hear about in movies and on commercials with Sarah McLachlan wailing in the background. The sort of thing you don't believe until you see it. Roxas has exactly 39 cigarette burns littering his arms, chest, abdomen, and legs. Roxas has two diagonal scars that sit caddy-corner directly above his heart from Seifer, so that all the world would know of his faulty heart. Roxas has a lump in the bridge of his nose from having it broken more than four times – twice in a period not long enough for the first two to heal – and he'll never be able to play baseball or basketball. The joints in his right wrist were crushed in a meat grinder in a cruel prank when he was five by his first foster father. The bones never healed right, and as such, Roxas's right hand forms a bit like a claw – not that Axel notices, not that Axel would ever care – but there are some who do. Axel sees the pain in Roxas's eyes when they're walking down Sam Cooper and assholes yell insults out the windows of their shit cars - "_freak! freddy krueger-leper freak!_"

But what Roxas is most sensitive about are his burns. Axel knows this because he's touched them, pressed his fingers to them and felt the subtle difference in texture from soft baby skin to amorphous, rotten scar tissue. He feels the way Roxas shudders, how hideous he thinks they are, how he shies away from Axel's touch and pretends they aren't there. It's why when Roxas first sees Axel smoking a joint, ten years old, catching a hit off one of the friendlier prostitutes on Lamar, the boy doesn't speak to Axel for a month. An entire month of pounding on Roxas's door until his foster mother threatens to pull a gun on him, until all the neighbours are hollering and their rottweilers are clawing at the chain length fences between shacks, mouths foaming and hungry for flesh.

When Axel catches himself, he's sitting back in the chair with his head propped against the railing, staring at Roxas who's staring out at the window – at a bleak sky filled with smog and Fed-Ex planes beginning to land. He contemplates telling Roxas that these cuts, these bruises – they don't mean a thing. He thinks about saying the sorts of things he's heard his mother tell her boyfriends; the things he's heard on television. But he can't quite find the words – they stay lodged in his throat, thick and stuck and cemented tight like tar.

And they say nothing and they feel nothing but the tension of something unaddressed and far beyond their age. The window is open and the smell of Chinese food wafts from the cheap hole-in-the-wall at the end of the street.

Axel's fingers twitch.

* * *

High school comes and brings with it the hierarchy of social prejudice and loathe, the prom kings and the homecoming queens with Chapstick smiles and big hair like they've seen in Beyonce videos. There are four groups of students at Frayser High School – the black jocks and their girlfriends, the white jocks and their girlfriends, the whores, tricks, baby prostitutes and sluts, and the other crowd – those who blend and weave and avoid attention when they can. And, when they can't, it's no being shoved inside a locker or a swirley with no kiss to soothe the ache. It's switchblades against flesh and cigarettes pressed to palms, teeth against the curves of ears – intimate almost in their punishments. Soft whispers drizzling malice onto shivering skin, gooseflesh on unscarred necks and the crunch of bone beneath hands clad in multiple class rings.

Axel, with his height and physical aptitude, becomes a jock. He plays basketball, runs track, and pitches for the baseball team. He isn't one to shove unsuspecting freshman into walls or press knives to the point of bruising – nor does he associate with the whores and the pretty baby sluts smelling of Angel perfume and the five-dollar cherry flavoured lube from Spencer's. No, Axel's first girlfriend is a delicate wisp of a girl named Namine – a dancer transferred from up North, a beautiful flaxen haired little angel who has no problem sucking his cock behind the bleachers before a game, where he can look down and see only blond hair and impossibly blue eyes and pretend that she's-

_blue eyes blonde hair pretty pink lips all he sees he has to have her to possess her to stop the need, she can make it stop, ignore the breasts ignore the gap between her teeth, the too small hands, the too big curve to her waist and dream of a soft, flat chest with scars and an arrhythmic heart_

-it's unspoken, his urge. The same urge he had when he was ten, when he was fifteen – Christ, it's wrong. He knows it's wrong. His mother leaves the radio blaring all hours of the night, and when Axel isn't getting laid or smoking dope at someone's party, he hears it, her Christian radio stations, as if three hours in the chapel on a Sunday isn't enough – it's sin, to want someone the way Axel wants the same pretty little blond from his childhood. How he can only thrust into Namine if he blocks out the sounds of her moans, soft, breathy exhalations, and thinks of the other's laugh, the way the boy from his childhood wrapped his hand around his fishing pole and cast his lure, teasing Axel with his hair catching gold in the sunlight. He presses his lips to Namine's and tastes her sweetness like overripe fruit – not like _he_ would taste, not like how he tastes in Axel's dreams – of ice cream, of humidity and the smell of rain, Sweet Tarts.

He hears about Roxas more than he sees him – the kid who got arrested on drug charges, released because he didn't have enough to qualify for possession. The kid who'll take any dick for a quick buck, the kid who snorts lines in the boy's bathroom before assemblies and laughs when the band asks for a moment of silence before the pledge of allegiance – laughs so high and so soft that everyone hears, until that emo girl Xion claps a hand over his mouth and pulls him to her, arms around him, and if Axel's fists don't clench at the sight of her hands on him.

But for the entirety of their senior year, Axel simply watches Roxas fall farther and father – accruing more of a reputation and two separate lines; one of the boys who want to fuck him, and one of the boys who want to fuck him up.

* * *

Axel and Roxas's friendship fell out around the last time Roxas asked him to leave – when Axel was 16, and the boy showed up at Axel's house clutching what must have been thousands of dollars in cash, handfuls of jewelry and an expensive car key.

"Come with me, Axel."

"Roxas..." Axel still hadn't wakened fully when Roxas pressed the key into his hand, pressed a finger against his lip hard enough to bruise. The night is heavy and hot and the feeling of Roxas straddling his right leg stirs a feeling in Axel's abdomen, a heat rising – but he's confused, and can only exhale softly, raising a hand to rub at his eyes. "What are you do-"

"I don't have a license to drive. C'mon Ax, this is our chance."

It's his tone that makes Axel pause – pause and remember a memory half suppressed in his mind. He doesn't smell ravioli this time – he smells musk and sweat, like Roxas's ran a mile in the stiffling heat of the Memphis summer. "Roxas... How did you get all this?" Axel's fingers don't dare reach out and touch the money; the mere thought of his grimy hands pressed again the wealth and glimmer and he's convinced himself he'd set it aflame in the torrid air of his room. There isn't time to protest as Roxas twines their hands together and brings Axel's trembling hand to his chest, thousands of dollars in cash the only barrier between Axel's sweating palm and Roxas's heaving chest. Axel's heart beats faster as the temperature flairs, as the room begins to spin.

"It doesn't matter. Just trust me."

It's a cruel twist of fate that Axel notices then the markings on Roxas's throat – dark, like bruises, but in the shape of something cruelly familiar. Like the markings he's seen in every porn he's ever beaten off too, like the markings his mother used to have when his father was alive and well. Axel's body tenses at the sight, at the recognition of the sight, the smell clinging to Roxas's flesh, every nerve ending on fire with a white hot rage he'd never quite known.

Jealousy.

Axel was jealous, jealous enough to kill, and suddenly the room is much hotter, the body on top of him becoming fair game for the sort of bloodsport his friends bathe in.

Maybe if he hadn't seen them, maybe if they had been overlooked – maybe they would have ran away to that factory in Baton Rouge, put in a down payment on an apartment in the city while Roxas passed the G.E.D. program and Axel worked in the factory. Maybe they could have been happy. Maybe they could have brewed wine from the lilac trees that flowered in the garden, and maybe one day Axel would have gathered the courage to lean over and kiss Roxas – heady and sweet like ambrosia. Maybe they would have had the white picket fence and a common-law marriage and two dogs, and maybe Roxas would have fucked some trick and popped out a couple kids for he and Axel to play house with.

But Axel saw them. He saw them full and clear in the light of the traitorous moon, stark and purple and horrible and in the shape of a large mouth – teeth marks.

"Roxas..." Axel's tone is dangerously low, lower than he's ever allowed it to be with Roxas. His eyes hardly dare to glance upward to the boy sprawled across his bed, no longer a boy, now – no longer the child of Axel's flashbacks of fishing in a filthy river, wind chime laughter in the afternoon. "...What did you do."

There's a moment of hesitation before Roxas sees it too – the line of Axel's sight, trained on the pale column of his throat littered with dark blotches. He raises his collar but it's too late – Axel's already turning over in bed, pulling the covers far over his head, drowning out the sound of Roxas's begging, pleading to listen, '_it was once, it was for you, everything for you, for us, for our __**chance**_' -

Axel's movements are quick and precise. Before Roxas can finish speaking, Axel has a hand at his throat, squeezing hard enough to stop the air from circulating. The look in Roxas's eyes is one of pure horror, and it quells the need pooling deep in Axel's stomach to slam the boy against a wall and press his lips against the younger boy's – _because fourteen year olds are supposed to be virgins, and how is it that little Roxas Williams lost it first_?

He carries Roxas by the throat to his window, shoves his body against the sill until the damn thing shatters – _keeping his mother from waking up be damned_ – and throws the money after him. The key hits Roxas in the stomach, and the boy flinches over in pain – the look in his eyes sets Axel's heart to pieces.

"Axel... _why_..."

It's barely whispered, but Axel can hear it as clearly as if Roxas had screamed it to him across an empty room. The redhead throws out the rest of the wealth Roxas found (_no, that isn't right – Roxas earned it, earned every last dollar, earned it by spreading his legs like a filthy whore_), and watches in disgust as Roxas scrambles to pick it up.

"I don't take charity from sluts."

There's a half-choked sob as Roxas crumples to his knees, the money slipping through his fingers. A couple hundreds float off in the still wind, the soft sound of Roxas's sobs mixing with the sound of sirens in the background – it's amazing to Axel, that the world still turns. That somewhere in the city, a child is being born, that somewhere someone's smoking up in a public place, that somewhere someone's dying and that somewhere someone's smiling, laughing, happy. That despite the fact that his heart's been ground into the gravel, Memphis is apathetic – Axel and Roxas are insignificant specks, just another cliché, dysfunctional love ballad that no one else will ever hear. The city still churns like maggots in a half-covered grave, and Axel laughs harsh and long into the breeze – the sound serrated like shattered window panes from drive bys in the night. He feels a bullet lodging in his chest – Roxas might as well have shot him dead.

"Axel..." Roxas's voice is small and choked, like he's eight years old again, chained to a hospital bed. "I did it for us... for you..." The boy scrambles slowly over the riches mixing with the dirt of Axel's parkway, benjamins smeared with grime and rubbish – a tribute to everything else in this town. "I want you to come away with me... I lo-"

Axel spits at his feet, and slams the window hard enough to rattle the wall.

* * *

Axel graduates in May, and manages to snag a sports scholarship to Mississippi State University. He dumps Namine when she asks him to marry her, in front of the entire graduating class, and he doesn't stop running, not when her high heel nails him in the back – not even when he hallucinates soft laughter coming from the bleachers.

It's hot in Starkville, and Axel fits in well down there – an agricultural school built on hard work and sweat. He spends his first year in a haze of parties and medical marijuana smoke, fucking blonde girls with blue eyes and making mediocre grades – just high enough to keep his sports playing afloat. Half the medical marijuana in the country comes from electric-fence lined fields in Mississippi, he learns from one of the days he pays a fifth of attention in Biology, and he doesn't ask his dealer which of the department stores he had to break into to steal nearly 20 lbs of dope.

His mother dies three days before his 21st birthday, over Winter Break, of pneumonia and a lack of health insurance. Axel misses her funeral and the phone call from the Memphis PD telling him she's gone; he's still unconscious, passed out drunk off moonshine on somebody's floor.

In the end, he stops playing baseball and drops out to go to the police academy up in Tupelo. They laugh when he tells them he's from Memphis – laugh and tell him he's the black egg in the carton as far as that's concerned, but he doesn't mind. When he was little, Axel wanted to fix his home – wanted to be Batman, with Roxas as his Robin, wanted to purge the city of the gangs and the drugs and the girls being raped, wanted to quit hearing about his friends being snatched up from their beds, or his neighbours shot cold blood in front of gas stations. He knows more now than he ever did about life – knows that Memphis schools will always be shit, knows that Memphis will always hover on the edge of ruin. But he's drawn to the city – drawn further and further in until all he can think about are job applications and getting through boot camp.

It's four years after he starts academy that he finally nails an opening in the Memphis Midtown police department – farther from Frayser than he'd dreamed, but close to the river and the downtown area, rife with college students and underaged drinkers to bust. He spends most of his days sitting on the main strip, writing parking citations and traffic tickets and (on rare occasion) apprehending shop-lifters or answering calls about suicides and jumpers. That was one thing he didn't learn about in Frayser. Nobody he knew in Frayser killed themselves – someone else always did it for them. But he's called in more than once on privileged college kids who rent hotel rooms just to perch on the edges – trembling fingers gripping the telephone to wet cheeks as they breathe their goodbyes to whoever it is they love most. That, or drive to church parking lots to pray to dogma and marble statues, swallowing pills like the lies they were taught about the real world, swallowing and gulping to feel full of something other than bullshit and angst. He doesn't have sympathy for people like that, or for those kids – but he feels pity. Pity, because they don't know a thing about the real world.

It's an easy life, nine to five most days, unless he's called in on a special case. Sometimes he manages to smuggle out dimebags from the evidence lockers, and roll a joint out of the Precious Moments bible paper his mother gave him as a child. Sometimes he goes back to Frayser – sees Roxas's foster mom's house boarded up, right next door to his own. He wonders about the blond more than he would choose; on every cocaine bust, on every suicide call, he almost hopes – with a sick pang in the pit of his gut - it'll be Roxas. Then, at least, there would be closure.

* * *

His closure comes at 2:14 in the morning.

It's a Tuesday morning and Axel receives a call about a floater. A girl, around 23, jumped off the Mississippi River bridge, they said. Her spinal cord severed on contact, and that girl drowned in her own bile, and the swirling, crushing black of a heartless sea.

When he arrives at the scene, he sees first his partner Riku pulling the kid out of the muck – a pretty thing, with red hair and eyes with pupils the size of pinpricks, when Axel gets around to slipping her eyelids closed. Unnatural, given she'd been dead for over thirty minutes – and an autopsy would no doubt reveal her body was still under the seize of some sort of narcotic cocktail. The kid smelled like wet dog, Jack Daniel's, and mud, her arms still caked in it. It was a wonder they'd recovered the body so fast, but a call had hit the downtown department before the kid ever jumped.

When Axel turns to his partner, Riku gestures off to the side, toward a body he'd half registered leaning against one of the concrete bridge legs – a body he'd assumed had been a paramedic, waiting for the go-ahead to haul her off to the morgue.

When Axel turns, he feels his jaw slide comically slack.

Blue eyes wide and nervous stare back at him, nose, cheeks, and chin scarred much more recent than the last time Axel viewed that face. His fingers were twitching, and he was obviously tweaking, but Axel knew that hair anywhere, no matter how matted and filthy and dank.

Roxas had made the call. Roxas had watched her jump. And when the ambulance leaves with the girl, and when Riku leaves to slog back into bed, Axel leaves with Roxas.

* * *

They end up at the Poplar Avenue greasy burger joint, and Axel buys Roxas six Krystal burgers and watches the kid tear into them like the tigers at the zoo, like Roxas hasn't eaten in months. And it looks like he hasn't – Axel can see his ribs through his soaking t-shirt. Roxas doesn't smell much better than the corpse of his old girlfriend (Kairi, Axel's told through muffled gobbles), and he's sweating like a pig. When Axel asks him what he's on, Roxas gives him a look that shoots nostalgia straight through his heart, the same look he gave Axel when he used to avoid talking about how he got his latest burns.

"You're a cop. I ain't fuckin' tellin' you shit."

Axel snorts, drains the final dregs from his shit stain coffee cup and resists the urge to punch Roxas square in the face. "You think I'd rat on you? It's been ten years, Roxas, and the only thing you can say to me is you ain't sayin' nothin?"

The boy takes a long pause from wolfing his way through another burger to swallow half his large, badly carbonated Pepsi (because Axel can't afford to take him anywhere that vended the great luxury of Coca-Cola), and stares straight at Axel. "You left me."

It's an accusation he takes in stride, because it's true – Axel never called. There were no letters, no visits over break.

"You missed your own mama's funeral."

This strikes a nerve, and Axel's fighting down hard the Pavlovian urges he's honed as a cop to slam the kid down on the table and cuff him. "My deepest apologies, Roxas. I truly am sorry I never called. I was afraid I might waste your time, or maybe interrupt you and one of those fags you were always bangin."

Axel sees what happens next in an almost premonition. Roxas jolts lightning fast from his seat, tosses the rest of his drink in Axel's face and makes a run for the door – but not before Axel's reflexes kick in, grabbing tight to Roxas's wrist and spinning the boy around, their bodies colliding with the glass of the window with a clang. The employee dozing off at the register half glances up before deciding sleep is of more importance – and at nearly 4 in the morning, Axel can't blame him.

"You're a fuck," Roxas spits, struggling hard to get out of Axel's grasp, both wrists pinned behind him. He possesses a wiry sort of strength Axel's used to, given his time handling meth heads and coke addicts. In school, they called it the drug drive. But Roxas is still a good half a foot shorter, still baby faced and predictably less than 110 lbs soaking wet – still bone thin like he was back when they starved in the winters in Frayser. Axel can smell the nicotine and alcohol and greasy burger on his breath, feel the outline of something sharp in his pocket – a switchblade, perhaps, or maybe a pipe. Axel's gun presses against his own hip, a reminder of his own form of protection – and the thought of shooting Roxas makes him more nauseous than the reek of whiskey on his breath.

"You oughta know all about fucks, given your track record," Axel grinds out, nudging a knee forward to press Roxas's thigh harder into the glass. "You're a manipulative little shit, you know that? I could arrest you right now, have you locked up for twenty to life, not that you're worth the money taxpayers'd put into the system to support you-"

"Shut UP, you sanctimonious prick!" In a rush of adrenaline, Roxas looses a hand and Axel freezes as a fist cracks across his cheek – before he's shoved Roxas against the wall again. "What about that little trick you fucked, huh?" Namine. Axel tightened his grip. He didn't think Roxas would have noticed. "You think I didn't watch her suck you off so many times before a game?" His laugh is bitter and dry, tinged with something Axel can't register, and it chatters at the end. Roxas's teeth are chattering, and Axel isn't sure if it's because of the drugs or the tears that are starting to gather in the corners of his eyes. "The fucking spitting image of me. Tell me, Axel, did you think of me when she was on her knees?" The laugh returns, growing higher and discordant and even the cashier's woken up now, and the cooks have come out of the kitchen, hovering vaguely around the scene, as if bewitched. Roxas looks down for a millisecond, before Axel's shot through with bloodshot blue eyes and soft, broken words. "Because you know what? Every dick I ever took, I thought of you."

There isn't time for air or a breath before Axel forces his lips down and forward, bruising Roxas's mouth with teeth that collide, and with Roxas's teeth chattering the way they are it's like kissing a vibrator, but all Axel can feel is the body beneath him – the boy he'd forsaken so long ago. Roxas makes a noise like an angry cat and grabs Axel's hair and yanks, and Axel's never been kissed like this, never felt this sort of heat before, not since nearly fifteen years ago when Roxas last asked him to run away, and it's been so long. He doesn't register the foul taste of Roxas's tongue, and he doesn't taste like rain or Sweet Tarts – he tastes of liquor and cheap food and spit and watered-down Pepsi. And Axel knows without a moment's hesitation that it doesn't matter – that he loves Roxas, unconditionally, that he always has and that the rest doesn't matter. His mother would roll in her grave, his department would ostracize him for being a fag, a pussy – it was all washed away at the feeling of a small, fragile body in his arms, melting as his hands brush burn and cuts and welts, everything that Roxas is. Scarred. Emaciated. Perfect.

And as seems the norm when confronted with Roxas, Axel can hardly breathe.

* * *

They're still kissing when Axel gets a phone call about why he and that witness never showed up for questioning. When they get to the station, the questioning is quick, perfunctory, and Axel slips Roxas some Xanax from the back room so he can "for Christ's sake, stop _shaking_."

They leave together at the end of the day – Roxas still waiting on the police station stoop smoking a Pall Mall and smiling at Axel, who takes his hand as they walk to his squad car. The redhead doesn't comment about how he'd been worried Roxas wouldn't be waiting, that he'd leave – the feeling he'd always had, nestled in the back of his mind. That someday, Roxas was going to leave him. That one day, Roxas would make the grades, get to college, and run – and Axel would be powerless to stop him.

But this time (_and it feels like they've done this a thousand times, again and again, repeatedly, in every possible way_), it was Axel who'd left – and somehow found his way back. He can't shake the feeling of deja vu – and so he doesn't try. He holds Roxas's hand tighter, comforted at the knowledge that it's there for him to hold.

Their fingers stay entwined the long drive to Axel's apartment, Roxas laughing and singing along – badly – to the song on the radio, something twangy and sweet and low, far too Texas for Axel's taste. But he doesn't complain. He keeps his eyes on the road, stroking a thumb over the back of a long forgotten hand, over cuts and scars, committing them to memory.

"We're okay," Axel says with a sense of finality, watching the smog glisten incandescent off the hot city pavement, glittery before the stop lights.

"I found you," Roxas whispers, a voice in his ear, and Axel sighs as a shudder racks his body.

He would never have to look again.

* * *

Roxas leaves Axel for six months in rehab for addictions to methamphetamine, cocaine, and alcohol. It's the roughest six months of Axel's life, and he calls every night – even when Roxas is strapped to his bed and screaming for a hit, the nurse unmercifully allowing communication via speakerphone – even through everything Roxas calls him, everything Roxas begs––

It's a tearful reunion, as is expected. Axel saves his paycheck for months, and starves himself to put Roxas through rehab, starves himself to bring the kid all the way back – and this time it's Axel whose ribs show through his uniform, and Roxas whose cheeks are back to being round and soft like before. Roxas makes a fuss about feeding him, practically drags him back inside to the cafeteria to beg a meal off one of the rehab facility workers – and Axel comes to understand just what Roxas was talking about, all six months he spent complaining about "this shitty ass hospital fop."

It's two years of hard work when Roxas finishes community college in nursing – gets a job at Baptist Hospital to help pay the rent, and Axel works overtime to keep them from going bankrupt, both from Roxas's schooling and the payment on their apartment. It isn't easy – as nothing is. It's a better life than they had in Frayser, but Axel catches Roxas more than once with half a bottle of gin warming his insides. And they scream, and they fight – and it's imperfect, like the skin of Roxas's chest, imperfect like Axel's nose after that punch in a Krystal years back. But they work through it; the separation, the anxiety on Roxas's end, the recovery. It's slow, and it's tedious, but neither of them allow it to fallow.

It's five years after that that they move out of Axel's shitty apartment in Midtown and buy one-half of a cute little duplex on Mud Island, with a windowbox and a picket fence and a bellchime that goes all through the night – and at Axel's insistence, two cats they name Meatloaf and Flea. They make love to the sound of the Mississippi River rolling, the barges floating past and the memories that go along with it.

Axel never leaves, and Roxas always stays.


End file.
